Mission & Goals

We believe the arts are uniquely capable of inspiring the collaboration and creative thinking crucial for effectively addressing complex social and environmental issues.

Mission Statement

RuckusRoots is an LA-based 501(c)(3) non profit organization that merges the arts and sustainability into empowering, interactive experiences for young adults and teens. We aim to provide underserved youth in Northeast Los Angeles with artistic opportunities that connect them to their communities, the planet and their own creative powers. Through immersive events, interactive installations, collaborative programs and thought-provoking public art, we unveil the positive, creative side of sustainability, transforming participants into proactive agents of change.

Goals

1. Create a positive environment in which participants discover and express their own creative powers

2. Instill participants with a sense of responsibility towards the environment and their local community.

3. Empower participants by teaching them new art, building and DIY techniques they can utilize to create a sustainable lifestyles and stable, creative futures.

4. Encourage art as a platform for expression about eco and social issues

5. Engage participants, local businesses and community members in collaborative sustainable art projects

6. Improve relationships between schools, students, local businesses and community members by creating awareness around the benefits of sustainable collaboration on the local level.

7. Support practicing artists and provide participants with mentoring and internship opportunities with local artists.

8. Support the arts by creating programs that illustrate the value of art as a vehicle for change, and as a sustainable lifestyle practice.

9. Provide arts programming in communities where it is lacking

10. Uncover environmental and social problems affecting the communities in which we work, and use the art we create to instigate the dialogue needed to improve them.

Why Our Work Is Important

Creativity Is Vital to a Building a Healthy, Sustainable Future

The proof is in the pudding: in a 2011 survey conducted by IBM, 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the number one “competitive edge” of the future. And Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has expressed that dance, music, theater, and visual arts “are essential to preparing our nation’s young people for a global economy fueled by innovation and creativity.”

Creativity is Undervalued in Our Society

Ken Robinson, a leading expert on education, creativity and innovation believes that from a young age, creativity is undermined in US culture, because our educational systems rely on a narrow, Industrial Age model that eschews the arts. “I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth, for a particular commodity, and for the future, it won’t serve us.”

“Human resources are like natural resources; they’re often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they’re not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.” ― Ken Robinson